The wind has finally blown itself out (well mostly)! It’s been so windy the last few days (and nights) that we’ve woken up with our batteries fully charged – that doesn’t happen very often. We’ve been seeing consistent wind above 20knots with gusts in the high 20s. With the direction change from north to east/south east, we’ve been sitting in calm water while the wind howls around us! It’s really nice to have an island wind breaker!!
On Monday, January 22, we decided to checked out the few beaches on Bond Cay. This was the first time I’ve been off the boat since we left West End on January 14!! (Mark did a dinghy trip to West End to buy gas for our Honda generator just before we left there.) It sure felt good to go for a dinghy ride and a beach walk. The beach was small but glorious – it was a fun walk and we explored a little bit of the island. Bond Cay appears to be deserted even though we saw a few houses near the water in one corner. These places looked very wind blown and empty. We didn’t go explore them!
This area of the Berry Island chain is only 30nm from New Providence (where Nassau is). There are a few areas just north of us that we’d like to visit via dinghy but will wait for the wind to die down some more. There are several private islands around us so we can only look at their nice beaches. We are still the only boat anchored here and it will probably stay that way.
You might wonder what we do all day long if stuck on the boat. Well that depends on who you are! For me it’s been a chance to read my book and catch up on my blog posts. I’ve also done a bit of laundry (and need to do more) but I haven’t been crocheting (yet!!). Mark has been busy finishing the varnishing on the aft head threshold – it looks amazing!! He’s also done a few maintenance jobs – change the fuel filter on the engine (those kind of things).
The big issue Mark has been dealing with is our freezer. After we filled it back in Florida, we’ve been trying to get it cold enough to freeze everything. It was doing a good job on the food at the very bottom but not the best job on the second and top layers. It’s a delicate balance on a boat – you can keep turning the freezer colder but then it runs longer, using more of your precious battery power. That’s the problem we were having – juggling temp and running time. Mark figured that the freezer probably needed more refrigerant (which we had onboard) so he added some. It’s a fine line between too much and too little refrigerant (and we don’t have the correct gauge to properly measure this) so the first attempt added too much. The freezer was running all the time and consuming way too much battery power. So Mark went back and removed some of the refrigerant and now the freezer is working perfectly and not running too much.
We still have 6 days here before we will move to our reserved dock on New Providence. The sun is out today so maybe we’ll go exploring again!
Crimson Kathryn and her crew 